Engine manufacturer Cummins will invest ₹1,500 crore to boost its research and development activity in India where the company employs about 10,000 people.

“We are investing about ₹1,500 crore in India by launching a new R&D facility in Pune. With the addition of the new facility, we’ll have about 2,500 engineers. Currently, we have 1,500 engineers working in our R&D facility in India,” Srikanth Padmanabhan, President, Cummins Engine Business, told BusinessLine.

Padmanabhan said that while the centre is working on creating engines suited for Bharat Stage IV and Bharat Stage VI emission norms, the India R&D centre is also increasingly acting as a base to create products for the world.

“I think we are starting to create our off-highway products from here. Over time, this place (India) will become the centre of excellence or core for certain range of products and technologies,” he said.

Cummins, which wants to be known as a technology company, trying to drift away from popularly known to be a diesel engine manufacturer, is harping on India’s tech talent to create connected car platforms, which require analysing data and creating insights from it.

“As we tend to think about big data and analytics, because of the capabilities of the Indian software industry and the people that are here, the work that we do on analytics will continue to increase where we will combine our product, our connected features that generates a lot of data and then to see how do we analyse the data for meaningful insights,” Padmanabhan said.

Cummins has 21 manufacturing facilities in India, employing over 10,000 people with revenues of Rs. 10,880 crore in 2016.